America’s most successful mayor stands down

When The economic expert visited motor city in tardily 2025 to question Mike Duggan, the city’s outgoing mayor, the aide scheduling the meeting sent over a piece of redundant information in advance: where to park. Your correspondent found it far more pleasant to amble to and from the Coleman A. Young Municipal Centre on foot.

When Mr Duggan took office, at the start of 2014, the parking instructions would have been more useful. A decade ago, walking through downtown Detroit was an unpleasant and inadvisable move. Skyscrapers that are now home to boutique hotels lay derelict. Street lights did not always function. At night drivers would deliberately blow through red lights rather than stop for potential carjackers.

On January 1st, after three terms in office, Mr Duggan will step down from the mayoralty. He leaves behind a city transformed—and not only in the sense that it is safe to walk to meet him. He has a reasonable claim to have been the most effective mayor in recent American history. In 2024 Census Bureau data showed Detroit’s population growing for the first time since 1957. In the decade to 2023, incomes in the city rose by almost twice the rate of that in the rest of Michigan. Carjackings have fallen by 90%. The city ended 2025 with a $105m budget surplus.

This November Mr Duggan intends to stand for a bigger office: governor of Michigan. After serving as a Democrat for his entire career, he is doing so as an independent. His aim, he says, is to repeat what he achieved in Motown for the whole state. That is, bringing together feuding politicians to work towards a greater good. Is such a goal plausible?

In Mr Duggan’s immodest but persuasive telling, Detroit was saved by breaking down partisan, corrupt politics. Before he took office, he says, “people would go home and watch reruns of that day’s city council meetings to see all the fights”. When Mr Duggan won, after an improbable write-in campaign, he brought this to an end. In the place of chaos, businesses were offered clear, consistent rules. That encouraged investment, and more tax, in turn helping the city to restore services, like street lighting. A virtuous circle began.

Mr Duggan says that he can achieve this for the state of Michigan too, and all the more so if he can win as an independent. “The partisan fighting in this state is the worst I’ve ever seen,” he says. The result, he argues, is an unemployment rate that is the fourth-highest in the nation and school-test results that have declined for decades. If he can win with both Republican and Democratic votes, he will have a mandate to hammer out compromises. What worked for Detroit can work for Michigan too, he says.

To pull off his plan, Mr Duggan has to win over Republicans without deterring too many of the Democrats who until recently, almost universally liked him. He implies this will be straightforward: the “ground is shifting rapidly” under both parties, he says, and “they’re so busy shouting that they don’t realise it yet”. But Donald Trump, with his outsize command of the nation’s attention, and his demands for absolute loyalty, is making his life tricky. In an interview, Mr Duggan refused to criticise the president on anything. Sitting less than half a mile away from Canada, he denied that Mr Trump’s bullying of the country is a problem.

The quieter Mr Duggan is about the president’s failings, and the more unpopular the president gets, the easier Democrats are finding it to hurt him. The former mayor’s priority “is putting himself, his MAGA donors, and corrupt insiders first”, said Curtis Hertel, the state party chairman. Michigan Republicans, meanwhile, are not yet won over by a mayor of a city they still mostly hate. Polling for the governor’s campaign has him sharply trailing both the most likely Democratic and Republican candidates. Mr Duggan should not be counted out: he has done great things before. But partisanship may crush him before he can crush it.

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